


when the waves drag you under

by cinderfell



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Chroma Conclave Timeskip, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Scars, crladiesweek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-25
Updated: 2017-04-25
Packaged: 2018-10-23 20:02:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10726224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinderfell/pseuds/cinderfell
Summary: Bearing a burden in silence leaves its marks.





	when the waves drag you under

**Author's Note:**

> hey guys can somebody just talk to pike please
> 
> day one of critical role ladies week: pike!

Sometimes it comes at night, when her mind is too quiet and there’s no one to put up a brave front for besides herself.

It fills her lungs like seawater until she can’t breath, wraps around her limbs like anchors and pulls her down until she’s too heavy to move from the bed, too heavy to call for Grog or Wilhand just a few rooms away.

Sometimes it keeps her asleep, tied down to dreams that she doesn’t want. Other times it thrusts her awake, the line between reality and nightmares blurring. She’s not sure which one she prefers.

She counts them over in her head sometimes, when it floods her head with too many whispers to block out.

She’s lost Grog twice. Both were over in an instant, but for two minutes she was an only child again and she’s not sure if she’s ever felt a worse pain than that.

She wasn’t even there for Vex. Not the first time.

(And it-- it _hurts_ that she has to think that. _The first time_.)

She wasn’t there for Percy either. She’d felt something break, not her necklace itself but something else, something that cracked inside of her and left her cold and aching and _knowing_ long before her family stumbled through the Sun Tree with his lifeless body in their arms. At least she was there for the second time. (And again, the very thought that this has happened more than once makes her chest clench with what she can only describe as _hurt_.)

She wasn’t there for Vax.

Or Scanlan. She got him the first time, but the second time… the second time she wasn’t good enough for--

She bites down on her bottom lip hard enough to draw blood and fights the urge to vomit as the copper taste fills her mouth.

Thrashing her way past the heavy sadness that weighs her down, she manages to push herself up off the bed and make her way to the desk on the other side of the room, sitting down in front of the partially cracked mirror she’s had for as long as she can remember.

Pike rubs the blood from her lips and mouth with a cloth and wipes away the tears, staring herself down in the dusty mirror.

“ _You look so much different,_ ” Wilhand had said when her and Grog returned home after the Conclave fell, after they all agreed to take time for themselves. There was a sadness to his voice, understanding. He stills looks at her with that in his face sometimes, although he seems to think she doesn’t notice.

She knows she looks different.

Her hair, of course. Her eyebrows remain a shade or two darker, but the rest is stark white; not a hint of the black that she had for her first… shit, over forty years at this point. It’s a mark of her own brush with death, her own resurrection-- their first resurrection. The scar crossing down her face and over one blue eye, luckily not taking her eyesight, is the most obvious of her scars. The others lay scattered across her skin. There’s a little bit near the tip of one of her pointed ears that’s missing. Grog likes to joke that they’re matching now, pointing at his own mangled ear.

She stands and takes a step back, just enough where she can see her body in the mirror. She raises her sleepshirt up so she can see her stomach, and… well. It’s not pretty. There’s no way it’s ever going to be pretty. The flesh of her stomach is distorted and heavily scarred, first by the glabrezu and then torn open again by Craven Edge. She takes a shaky breath before lowering the fabric back down again.

She _feels_ different.

She’s felt different for a long time.

It’s hard to pinpoint where it first started, when the water in her lungs and the weight on her chest first happened. She thinks… she thinks it may have started with Vex. Vex and the tomb and the Raven Queen and the _not there, not there, never there when they need her, and--_

Pike steels herself and climbs back into bed, staring up at the ceiling as she fights off the sound of seawater creeping in around her.

She can’t do this. She can’t keep letting this happen.

If she can’t bear the burden of all that they’ve seen, then how can they?


End file.
